animation

Maxime Bruneel directs a 9-minute musical short film with a famous song by Serge Gainsbourg, Variations sur Marilou, interpreted in 2006 by Alain Bashung.
The lyrics are based on false repetitions. The same sentences regularly come back, slightly modified. Maxime Bruneel built his music video on the same scheme, with a certain number of extended shots to create variations. The unusual length of the song and its slow and repetitive rhythm claim a strong principle of mise-en-scene. Maxime chose to create 74 animated shots and transfered them to an editor as he would normally do for a live-action music video. The main constraint would have been do the whole project without any precise preview of the music video's cut, without any complete raw cut. The music video thus keeps a spontaneous side with unexpected and cyclic transitions in the repetitiveness.
The song rests between reality and fantasy. The music video explores this aspect by showing Marilou's gestures, parallel to the imaginary world of desire, all at once. It thus responds to the very daring worlds of Bashung and Gainsbourg. Maxime Bruneel's challenge was to achieve to show this image without it being shocking or bandied about. We are closer to Courbet's "Origine du monde" than today's pornographic films.
History reminder :
In 2006, Alain Bashung records his version of "L'Homme à la Tête de Chou", the mythical and totally uncharacteristic album recorded in 1976 by Serge Gainsbourg. In this version, recorded for the musical created and directed by choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta in 2009, Bashung performs, as only he could do it, this 12-song poetic masterpiece, written by the grand Gainsbar. With his inimitable phrasing, his warm and sensual voice, Bashung imposes his silences, draws the contours of poetic and urban images, always surprisingly modern and exact, with this rock and classy elegance that qualifies him.